Quotes About Culture

A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. … Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind.

All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities of life.

We ain't in the game to love these hoes, you suppose to hit it and pass it to the left. I didn't love that hoe, it was just something to do.

Since language is community, if the cognitive ecology of a language is altered, so is the community.

The truest evidence that any civilization ever leaves behind about itself is its art. Art never lies.

We lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Northwest D.C. I was essentially raised by a Panamanian man and a Jamaican woman. That's why I have such a fascination with Jamaican food.

I'm very proud of my Nigerian heritage. I wasn't fortunate enough to be raised in a heavy Nigerian environment, because my parents were always working. My father was with D.C. Cabs and my mother worked in fast food and was a nurse.

at times expressing his conviction that literature and music were being absorbed by television, which was turning people into voyeurs.

If you could forget mortality... You could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving. Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras.

Anyone who reads, even one from the remote Southwest at the far end of an attenuated tradition, is to some extent a citizen of the world, and I had been a hungry reader all my life.

It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation.

When you marry into a Mormon family you marry tribes and nations.

In this room hung with the trophies of culture, her story sounded melodramatic and rough. She felt like a squaw explaining how you tanned a deerskin by working brains into the bloody hide and then chewing it all over until it was soft.

Buenos dias ," she said in response to Hernandez's soft greeting. They had a pact to speak only Spanish to each other, with the result that their conversation never got beyond hello and good-bye.

I never learned to say shit before a lady. I don't believe in progress in quite the way you seem to. You believe in it more than Grandmother did. As for those purely cultural patterns of convention you think I ought to escape from, they happen to add up to civilization, and I'd rather be civilized than tribal or uncouth.

We have made a tradition out of mourning the passing of things we never had time really to know, just as we have made a culture out of the open road, out of movement without place.

Imprisoned in reiterative seasons, vacillating between hope and disappointment, they were kept from being the vigorous doers that their nature and their culture instructed them to be.

The natives of the rain are rainy men.

Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftanOf tan with henna hackles, halt!

I am a native in this worldAnd think in it as a native thinks.

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

I like Rhine wine, blue grapes, good cheese, endive and lots of books, etc., etc., etc., as much as I like supreme fiction.

I never make a trip to the United States without visiting a supermarket. To me they are more fascinating than any fashion salon.

This spirit of tolerance and understanding has been from the beginning one of the most cherished ideals of Buddhist culture and civilization. That is why there is not a single example of persecution or the shedding of a drop of blood in converting people to Buddhism, or in its propagation during its long history of 2500 years. It spread peacefully all over the continent of Asia, having more than 500 million adherents today.